19 Eylül 2008 Cuma

The story of Martin Guerre, written in narrative form by Natalie Zemon Davis and the historical movie on this story are comparable, first of all, in terms of their potential “to familiarize the unfamiliar” distant past to the readers and the audiences. This is one of the two important functions of narrating the past. The other is the assumption that the past experience, the center of which is occupied by the real man, could best be written in the narrative form if one wants to make sense of it. If we think history, in maybe too general words, as the endeavor to set up bridges between the past and the present to grasp, to explain or to interpret the continuous experience of humanity, despite its discontinuous nature, to the heterogeneous occupiers of the present, then narrating may occur through different channels of communication. Nowadays, we know that many historians have the modesty not to claim the absolute authority of telling the one and only one truth at the end of an accumulation of professional experience of more than a century. Then, I can talk about the levels of past reality in addition to the probable different versions, even if not in terms of event but in terms of causalities and intentionality, of it. In terms of reconstructing the intentionality, the movie is more limited to represent the self-reflexivity of the fictive nature of narrative form through the narrative itself. Because the film has to be organized in a more or less standard sequence of narrative, consisting of introduction, development and conclusion, it has to choose one of the ways of reasoning to the acts of characters. The film goes beyond the limit of this sequence a little bit thanks to that the movie does not run synchronously to the story of Martin Guerre. The real time of the movie is of the conversation between the wife of Martin and the councilors of the Parliament of Toulouse following the trials. Even if this is not equal to the representation of a third person with a more distanced eye and so not more “objective” but more able to check and reflect the other possibilities of why things happened as they did; thanks to that sort of montage, movie hold some questioning potential. Maybe the role of this third person in the film is shouldered by the Jean de Coras, one of the councilors who attended the trial and afterwards wrote an account of the case of Martin Guerre. The so-called third one is functioning to interrogate the position of Bertrande de Rols to the case, whether she did not really recognize the fake Martin and reasons of that throughout the film. Visual representation has its own advantages and disadvantages. It has the potential to reconstruct the historical milieu in detail and this of course increases much the familiarizing power to the distance past of narrating historical experiences. This “real” scenery of the era facilitates to participate to the story, to make sense of it for the audiences. This is a way of learning as well as a way of feeling the state of belonging to the centuries-long adventure of people, of societies. As for the written version of the story, it is more open to the probabilities that can break down the coherence of the narrative while it lacks the visualizing the peasant life in 16th century. Even if Natalie Zemon Davis did not emphasis on the possibility of that the wife was really duped, instead of participating willingly to the play of fake Martin; it is still a possibility in the book, differently from the movie. Davis contextualizes the wife, her choice in the book and it is this contextualization that led the historian author to think that Bertrande should have been recognized that the man came back was not the eight-year-absentee. She portrays a woman who is aware of the peasant world in which she lives, of the very limitations and advantages of her position as a neither single nor widowed woman and does her best in almost a rational way. Davis’ account is really persuasive in the sense that her detail narrative about the economic, social, institutional and psychological portrait of this16th century village and that the analytical and comparative methods she used towards her sources. These characteristics of the historical account, despite its fictionalized characters, make it a more extensive representation of the complex historical reality than the fictive account, the movie and may lessen the distance between the inaccessible “actual” and the fiction but trying to figure out the motives behind the historical actions almost always compromises in itself the risk of attributing present day mental habits and values to the past and Davis is aware of that. Also she is criticized by the historian Robert Finlay for portraying Bertrande as the accomplice of the fake Martin for her own romantic needs. It is the romantic framework of mostly the film of which advisor is Natalie Zemon Davis herself and of the book also, even if in less dramatized form, which makes the story worth to listen for much of the audiences. This reminds me the Stephan Bann’s romantic desire for history. All in all, I do not think the fictive and the historical accounts could substitute one another. Both have their own possibilities and limitations and both are able to portray different levels of complex historical reality as well as their potential to manipulate this reality thanks to the very nature of their ways of narrating things.

28 Kasım 2007 Çarşamba

About "Who Killed Shadows"

As a piece of art, the film "Who Killed Shadows" is really a brilliant one. I think whether it succeeds to recreate the cultural life of early Ottomans is in part related to what the author intended to do. Because the period in which the film takes place is known by a very little group of scholars through a few historical documents, the accuracy of representations are open to debate. How far the early Ottomans had preserved their old Turkic traditions in a geography which is in the neighborhood of Byzantines and over which Islamic ways of life and ruling spread gradually. How far they were transformed by the encounter with rooted Byzantine culture and as recent Muslims to what extent they varied from the Islamic orthodoxy. All possible answers to these questions constitute the different point of views about the foundation of Ottoman Empire. I think such a variety of answers provide the author with a sort of freedom while dealing with the problems of recreation of a cultural sphere.

He posited himself out of the progress or degeneration in time dichotomy. According to me, the main framework of the film is the question of power and of self-interest. The author sees seeking power and interest as the main motives of all actions whether in past or present. But I think he dismisses that the notions of power and self-interest may themselves be historical; they may appear in different ways in different times. The story is plotted around these assumptions and the pieces of historical facts were chosen and put together for the purpose of showing how the world does not change or more specifically how "we" do not change. The film is an enterprise of re-writing the history of victims of power networks and of interest groups, Havicat and Karagöz, whose story was somehow tamed. In this sense, the film lacks the historicity for its seeking confirmation to the universalistic assumptions related to the author's present-day perspective. According to the author, with Hacivat and Karagöz, freedom, culture of critique, a lively humor etc. were also killed in these lands. But on the other hand, the film is trying to show how perceptions of Islam and being Muslim may change over time. How present-day idealizations of past may be ahistorical. In this sense, it raises an oppositional voice against the idealizing perceptions of Islam in the formations years of Ottoman society and at that point, historicity comes into the scene. I think the author is loyal to Kafadar's conception of bicolage; that is heterodoxy of the early Ottoman state and culture. In adaptation process of Ottomans to the cultural environment, cultural and administrational element with different origins, Byzantine, Islamic or Turkic, shaped them. The result was a synthesis.

The film takes place in Bursa in 1330, in the time of Orhan Beg. In that time, Ottomans were already Muslims. What is important, however, is what being Muslims meant to them. Kafadar says before the 1337 inscription, the first known self-written document of Ottomans, an endowment deed from 1324 shows that "the budding beglik had been already touched by the so-called higher Islamic ruling traditions." This means that Ottomans was on the way of transformation from being warrior nomads to a settled and organized state with its mentality and institutions. In the film, we see this transformation by the coming of Kadı Pervane who had escaped from the wrath of Mongols. While he looked at the city with his men, he said that the Ottomans, far way the Mongols, Arabs and Persians, were enlarging silently. In fact he was running after his own interest and Orhan's beglik was suitable for him to gain power and wealth. That's why he had chosen to come there according to the film, there was no higher ideal; he did not gaza ideal as did the Turkic people who were recent Muslims. Following his arrival and his acceptance as a high officer by Nilufer, a sort of bigotry came to Bursa. Even though he was received by a woman, Nilufer Hatun, he criticized, in the name of Islam, women's presence in public life just like men and their functions as the protectors of the city when men were absent. Ibn Batuta mentions such an egalitarian character of early Ottoman society. He says that he was surprised by the women's warmth when he met them. The representation of the relations between men and women and of women in public life in the film is somehow consistent with Batuta's image of Ottoman society. However, as far as I have read, Batuta does not mention whether or not women of the time use headscarf or that sort of thing. In the film, no high rank women use it, but among the passes-by there are some wearing scarf-like things. I am not sure that this is about a distinction between culture of folk and of the rulers. It rather seems the author put the symbol of headscarf and Pervane's critics of women in public life at the same side and the egalitarianism at the opposite of them. The woman without headscarf, as a symbol of freedom of woman, seems to point out the continuity of Turkic way of life in a recently Muslim society.

Goffman says that in that time the prize of being Muslim was not social, but political and military. Maybe we might add the economical one when we think of the film. We see a row of people who wanted to be Muslims for various reasons. Most of them chose Islam for taking advantage of being a member of Ahi organization, as Karagöz did. Ahi organization was just an interest group, an access to power in the film. They stole for the stone of mosque to build their tekke. They had one piece of the diamond probably because they had an agreement with the Kadı Pervane. Actually they were sufi dervishes who led the conversion of nomadic Turks to Islam. Their perception of Islam was a synthesis of Islam and their previous shamanic religion. They represent a heterodox Islamic tradition and they had their own rituals. Batuta's impression of the organization is one of the first hand information about it. He mentions their hospitality, how they organized life and their rituals. There is no mention of all these in the film. All in all, what the film recreates is really a lively scene. The human as a natural being with his passions is at the center. In that sense the film misses the possibility of historicity and contextuality of the self. On the other hand, I think it rearranges Kafadar's bricolage and it presents one of the possible answers to the question who we were 700 hundred years ago.sad_lisa